[Hammond:] One of the things I think you see is it– so many companies have used the words, partnering model, for years, and it’s been more or less lip service. But you do see a little bit more of a partnering and more highly tailored model. As an example, if you look at some of the projects that we see companies like a Pivotal or an IBM running these days, they may actually start in a garage that is near the organization so in San Francisco, or in London, or in New York City, but they start off-site. And the client’s developers, the client’s business personnel, go to those rooms, those war rooms if you will, and start work. Now, over time, some of that work may migrate offshore, or migrate back to the client. In the case of Pivotal, they’ll run multiple teams through their centers. Allstate is a really good example where they have I think over 100 developers and have kind of been through that process now, and they’ve drained their local talent pool. But it’s much less a, “This is the work we need to do and here’s the requirements and here’s the scope and let’s put this out to bid.” It’s much more a business transformation or a re-engineering type of project that is very high-touch. And I don’t see companies being able to do that if they’re not at least down the street from their clients and from their development shops. So I think it changes the nature of the types of engagement. I think it’s one of the reasons that you’ve seen so many of the large systems integrators buying agency talent as quickly as they can, because when you look at the sort of design experience techniques that are used, journey mapping, ethnography, those sorts of things, at least right now they still tend to be very custom – almost a manual process. You see sticky notes up on walls. You see war rooms. You see an environment that is kind of hard to capture from a remote, tool-based sort of delivery model.

In 2015, an estimated 300,000 full-time employees in computer science jobs worked from home in the US. (This figure also includes related professions such as actuaries and statisticians, but the vast majority are programmers.) Although not the largest group of remote employees in absolute numbers, that’s about 8% of all programmers, which is a significantly larger share than in any other job category, and well above the average for all jobs of just under 3%.

8% is not really that much, but the proportion versus other jobs is large, “more than double.” Of course, doubling, even tripling, small numbers doesn’t really get you that far.

[W]e found that people working from home completed 13.5% more calls than the staff in the office did—meaning that Ctrip got almost an extra workday a week out of them. They also quit at half the rate of people in the office—way beyond what we anticipated. And predictably, at-home workers reported much higher job satisfaction